Abstract

Site managers meet complex problems in their day-to-day work and have to find
solutions promptly. However, the industry does not capture this valuable experience
and may even not realise its significance. If this knowledge is collected, structured
and disseminated, there would be significant benefits to the companies as well as the
whole construction industry. This research is to test and improve a simple yet robust
approach for this purpose. The site managers keep an audio diary of a problemsolving
event by Dictaphone each week which contains their personal knowledge and
thinking. Then the managers are debriefed about the set of their recorded events each
month in order to explicate the significance embedded in these events and to
transform it into knowledge accessible to a wider audience. With the participation of
site managers from a dozen small and medium sized construction companies across
the country, the event recording and debriefing process last for six months. The
preliminary findings from the research indicate that audio diary and debriefing as a
tool for knowledge management are effective and efficient for practitioners to capture
and distil their learning and tacit knowledge.